“Probably,” the U.S. officer said. “Most of the time, it’s no damn good. Somebody got a gun, he’ll punch your ticket for you before you get close enough to throw him through a wall.”
“Learn me anyways,” Spartacus said. “Mebbe I got to impress some niggers, git ’em to jine up with me. I do dat fancy shit, dey reckon I’s tough enough to suit.” He paused. His mouth twisted. “Hope I find me some niggers to impress. Ain’t so many left no more, ’cept for the ones already totin’ guns.”
He was right about that. Ten years earlier, the countryside hereabouts would have been full of sharecropper villages, full of blacks. Mechanization and deportation had taken care of that. Not many Negroes remained out here, and fewer all the time. Mexican soldiers and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards from the towns took ever more to train stations. Off they went to one camp or another. And it grew clearer and clearer that the camps didn’t house them, or not for long. The camps just killed them, as fast as they could.
“Assembly line for murder,” Jonathan Moss murmured.
“What you say?” Spartacus asked.
“Nothing. Woolgathering, that’s all.” Moss was glad the guerrilla chief hadn’t understood him.
Nick Cantarella had. “Army’s coming,” he said. “Won’t be too fucking long, either. Chattanooga’s fallen. Even the Confederate propaganda mill can’t spew lies about that any more. If our guys aren’t in Georgia already, they will be pretty damn quick. Territory north of Atlanta’s rough, but it’s not that rough. I don’t think Featherston’s fuckers can stop ’em once they get rolling again.”
“We still be breathin’ when they gits here?” Spartacus asked. “Can’t hardly think about hittin’ towns no mo’. Got to stay alive first.”
“What happen to me?” Arminius asked, holding his head as if afraid it might fall off any minute now. Considering what Cantarella did to it, it might, too. Moss wouldn’t have wanted a well-aimed shoe clomping into the side of his noggin.
“You done did somethin’ dumb, dat’s what,” Spartacus answered, and then came back to the problem at hand: “Wanna hit the damn ofays. Don’t wanna jus’ lurk out here like swamp niggers in slavery days.”
“You can get dynamite, right?” Cantarella asked. Spartacus nodded. Cantarella went on, “And you can get alarm clocks, too, yeah?”
“Reckon so,” Spartacus said. “What you thinkin’ ’bout? People bombs is too risky, even if we finds folks willin’ to do it. These days, ofays see a nigger they don’t know, they jus’ start shootin’. Can’t get close enough to blow up a lot of ’em.”
“Auto bombs,” Cantarella said. “Set the timer for sunup, but drive in during the middle of the night, park the son of a bitch, and then get out if you can. All the shrapnel flying, auto bombs make a mess of things even if they don’t have a big crowd around ’em.”
Spartacus sighed. “Yeah, we do dat. Dey don’t patrol as good as dey oughta. But it ain’t the same, you hear what I say?”
“We hear,” Moss said. He didn’t want to make himself too prominent right now. The guerrillas had attacked the airstrip on his account. He would have enjoyed strafing Confederates in Georgia if he’d stolen an airplane. He would have enjoyed flying off to U.S.-held territory even more. Instead…Instead, the band wrecked itself. That was all there was to it. Spartacus and the surviving Negroes-fewer than half those who’d gone to the airport-didn’t want to admit that, even to themselves, for which he couldn’t blame them. But it was true.
They’d fought the Mexicans on even terms before the debacle. Now they ran from them. They had to. They would get chewed to bits if they didn’t.
A buzz in the air overhead made everybody look up nervously. “Reckon the woods hides our fires good enough?” Spartacus said.
“We’ll find out,” Nick Cantarella answered.
That wasn’t what Moss wanted to hear. And, a minute or so later, he wanted even less to hear the screech of falling bombs. They wouldn’t be big ones-ten-pounders, say, thrown out of the airplane by hand the way bombardiers did it back in the early days of the Great War. But when he had no trench or foxhole to jump into, all he could do was flatten out on the ground and hope for the best.
The Confederate pilot wouldn’t be aiming any fancy bombsight, not in an obsolete airplane like the one he was flying. He’d just fling the bombs out and hope for the best. Not much chance of doing damage that way, not unless he got lucky. But when the first bomb knocked down a tree less than a hundred yards from the fires, Moss wasn’t the only one who cried out in fear.
More bombs rained down, some bursting farther away, others closer. Fragments snarled past. One man’s cries went from fear to pain. Moss got up and bandaged the gash in the Negro’s leg. He didn’t have needle and thread, but used a couple of safety pins to help close the wound.
“Thank you kindly, suh,” the guerrilla said, and then, “Hurts like a motherfucker.”
“I’m sorry-I don’t have any morphine,” Moss said.
“Didn’t reckon you did,” the black man answered. “Somebody ’round here will, mebbe. When the bombs let up, he get up off his ass an’ stick me. You got balls, ofay, movin’ while they’s comin’ down.”
“Thanks.” Moss didn’t think the risk was especially large, which was why he’d done it. He didn’t say that, though. Being old and white isolated him from Spartacus’ band. No one till Arminius had blamed him for the fiasco at the airstrip, but it stuck in his mind-and, no doubt, in the guerrillas’ minds, too. Any way he could find to win back respect, he gladly accepted.
After a few minutes, the little puddle-jumper of an airplane buzzed and farted away. The Negro Moss had bandaged was the only man hurt. Spartacus said, “We gots to git outa here. That pilot, he gonna tell the ofays an’ the greasers where we at. They come after us in the mornin’.”
“We ought to pull out, yeah,” Nick Cantarella said. “But we should set up an ambush, blast the crap out of those bastards when they poke their noses where they don’t belong.”
Spartacus thought about it. At last, reluctantly, he shook his head. “Can’t afford to lose nobody now. Can’t afford to lose no machine gun, neither.”
Cantarella looked as if he wanted to argue. After a moment, he shrugged instead. “You’re the boss. Me, I’m just a staff officer.”
“Nah. Them fuckers never come up where they kin hear the guns,” Spartacus said. Moss and Cantarella both guffawed. Most of the guerrillas looked blank. Sure as hell, Spartacus had seen staff officers in action-or in inaction-when he wore butternut during the last war. The men he led weren’t old enough to have fought for the CSA the last time around.
If they’d had the chance, if they’d been treated decently, they might have done it this time. How many divisions could the Confederates have squeezed from their colored population? Enough to give the USA fits; Moss was sure of that. But the Freedom Party didn’t want Negroes on its side. It wanted them gone, and it didn’t care what that did to the country.
Moss shook his head. He didn’t have it quite right. The Freedom Party thought getting rid of Negroes was more important than using them. That struck Moss as insane, but it made whites in the CSA happy. Jake Featherston wouldn’t have got elected if it didn’t; it wasn’t as if he ever made any secret about what he had in mind.
The guerrillas had to rig a litter of branches and a blanket to take the wounded man along-he couldn’t walk. He offered to stay behind and shoot as many soldiers and stalwarts as he could, but Spartacus wouldn’t let him. “Can’t do enough with no rifle, and we ain’t leavin’ no machine gun here,” he said. They got the Negro-his name was Theophrastus-onto the litter and hauled him away.
Moss let out a mournful sigh. If things had worked out the way he wanted, he would be back on the U.S. side of the line now. He might be flying a fighter again. How much had they improved while he sat on the shelf here? He didn’t-couldn’t-know. But he was still fighting the enemy, which he hadn’t been while stuck in Andersonville. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.